AMD's Triple Glory in PC Games Hardware - Reader’s Choice Awards

17th February 2014
AMD have announced three awards bestowed upon them by readers of German publication PC Games Hardware. Consisting of first place for both the AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU (Product of the year award) and best Graphics Chip with a runners up spot in the CPU category.

Commenting on AMD's success Carsten Spille, editor of PC Games Hardware said “Our readers are willing to spend their money only to buy the best technology, and they obviously have strong and educated opinions on what hardware and software represents the pinnacle of performance and value. This result for the new Radeon R9 290X, as well as a win for best graphics product and second place in processors show that AMD is creating the right products for the market today.”

AMD Radeon R9 290X
These new Graphics Cards from AMD have been making waves in recent months and these latest awards compound what an exceptional job AMD are doing. Key points of the R9 290X that have made it such a success include.

UltraHD (4K) Compatible

AMD's TrueAudio technology built in

Up to 1 GHz Engine Clock

4GB GDDR5 Memory

Up to 5.0Gbps memory clock speed

A maximum of 320GB/s memory bandwidth

5.6 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power

Supports DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3 and Mantle

2,816 stream processing units

Darren Grasby, corporate vice president and general manager, EMEA at AMD said "We’re delighted that PC Games Hardware’s readers love our products, and grateful to them for recognizing the hard work AMD engineers have put into making the ultimate GPU for a new era of gaming. While pure horsepower is always a good thing, the AMD Radeon R9 290X is a complete package for breathtaking graphics and audio thanks to its Graphics Core Next architecture and AMD TrueAudio technology. Last but not least is Mantle, which helps games developers speak directly to the GPU architecture in its native language, unlocking an incomparable level of hardware optimization, enabling amazing image quality and performance.”

Steam Machine
With the Steam Machine Gaming PC Platform to be released later this year and current information pointing towards it being more likely to be an AMD and not an Intel based system, AMD's decision to move their technologies forward as a complete package would seem to be a very good business decision. Incorporating TrueAudio into graphics and graphics into CPU's should ultimately end with a gaming system that leaves the newest PlayStation and XBox releases trailing.

AMD

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) are a Processor Design and Manufacturing company, they are most well known for their ranges of Desktop PC Processors but also supply Mobile and Server Processors. The latter being primarily for cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD devices are used everywhere from the smallest PC to state of the art Super Computers. Their purchase of ATI in 2006 has led to AMD developing CPU's that not only do normal processing functions but also graphics processing functions within a single chip.